Winning Back The Arts

I made the argument on National Review Online last week that conservatives were actually winning back the arts from the left – and that we needed to do more to secure the victory:

After years of declaiming against the Left’s domination of our culture, I’m startled and delighted to discover that the tide is beginning to turn. My fellow conservatives should take note and lend a hand.

For the last three decades or so, the usual conservative approach to the arts has been threefold: We complain about what’s being produced; we fret about the influence it will have; then we give up with a shrug.

We complain because it seems to us the anti-American Left has made of the arts its private fiefdom. Moviemakers produce film after film decrying the anti-Communist blacklists of the ’50s, all the while blacklisting and slandering conservative filmmakers and their points of view. Critics give prizes and praise to second-rate leftist works — from dreadful tripe such as The Color Purple in the ’80s to the recent slew of soporific and dishonest anti–War on Terror propaganda flicks such as In The Valley of Elah and Green Zone — while ignoring or attacking works with which they disagree. Public funding is available to display desecrated crucifixes as “art,” while art that might be offensive to Muslims — such as the novel Jewel of Medina or the TV satire South Park — is censored with barely a murmur.